Video collaboration has become the norm and a fully eligible way to collaborate with stakeholders, customers and internally for all companies. This huge shift, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led businesses to prepare their offices and solutions for the hybrid working mode. With employees now returning to offices, we’ve come face-to-face with a fundamental change in working culture – and the new requirements for solutions supporting it.
One key element of the change is that we've finally become accustomed to seeing ourselves on video. Where two years ago we saw only black screens, people are now acting naturally with their cameras on. The habit and continuous practice have led us not to think of the video as a camera filming us, but as a tool to collaborate and participate virtually.
Simultaneous with increased demand for video conferencing equipment that has during the past months skyrocketed, we’re facing a new geopolitical situation that causes challenges such as component shortages and logistical problems.
How to equip your organisation for the new working culture
As we’ve all already become accustomed to Teams meetings, video readiness may seem like an achieved goal. But the more we collaborate through video, the more business-critical it becomes to secure a good quality video collaboration.
In remote meetings during the pandemic, where everyone participated through their personal computers, a cloud-based Teams meeting was a good enough solution for the time being. But the more people participate in the video meetings from the office, the more complex the situation becomes. The Teams environment and the traditional video conferencing equipment in the meeting rooms simply don’t communicate together very well.
As almost all meetings are now held in hybrid mode, the office space also faces a need to undergo a change. The need for meeting rooms equipped with video collaboration solutions has grown exponentially.
Considering the new generation of video collaboration products, the quality of the collaboration is one of the key features: large screens display all remote participants in good size for the meeting room participants, and wide-angle cameras equipped with group framing and speaker tracking enable remote participants to follow the conversation held in the room.
But how can businesses equip the workplace for the new working culture while utilising previous investments made in meeting room technologies? The key words are integration and Gateway solutions.
Digitising the encounters
Communicating through video is one thing, maintaining fundamental business relations through virtual collaboration is another. The more essential this type of communication becomes for the business, the more value and importance must be given to maintaining the constant high quality of the connections, solutions and products that make the collaboration possible.
And even though internal video meetings have become a regular fixture for most businesses, many are still struggling to set best practices for collaboration with external stakeholders. Remote work and video meetings are the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitising all the different encounters of an organisation.
As part of digitising their customer experience, many companies have started to build video enabled customer service, as the consumer customers have also grown to expect digital face-to-face collaboration and approve video delivered service even in their most private encounters, such as doctor’s appointments.
As virtual collaboration to this extent is new for most of us, it may have gone unnoticed how much work a secure and always available video connection actually requires. The solutions are evolving so rapidly and taking such significant steps in terms of reliability, compatibility and security, that it takes effort even from the best in the field to keep up with the development of the industry – let alone IT departments from whom the business-critical nature of this capability often goes unnoticed.
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